distinguish the notes of any one person. Deeper, more sonorous tones now
issued from the revolving globes, sometimes resembling in character the
vox humana of an organ, and every time they rose to a certain pitch
there were responsive sounds--not certainly from any of the
performers--low, tremulous, and Aeolian in character, wandering over the
entire room, as if walls and ceiling were honey-combed with sensitive
musical cells, answering to the deeper vibrations. These floating aerial
sounds also answered to the higher notes of some of the female singers,
resembling soprano voices, brightened and spiritualized in a wonderful
degree; and then the wide room would be filled with a mist, as it were,
of this floating, formless melody, which seemed to come from invisible
harpers hovering in the shadows above.

Lying back on my couch, listening with closed eyes to this mysterious,
soul-stirring concert, I was affected to tears, and almost feared that I
had been snatched away into some supra-mundane region inhabited by
beings of an angelic or half-angelic order--feared, I say, for, with
this new love in my heart, no elysium or starry abode could compare with
this green earth for a dwellingplace. But when I remembered my own
brutal bull of Bashan performance, my face, there in the dark, was on
fire with shame; and I cursed the ignorant, presumptuous folly I had
been guilty of in roaring out that abominable "Vicar of Bray" ballad,
which had now become as hateful to me as my trousers or boots. The
composer of that song, the writer of the words, and its subject, the
double-faced Vicar himself, presented themselves to my mind as the three
most damnable beings that had ever existed. "The devil take my luck!" I
muttered, grinding my teeth with impotent anger; for it seemed such hard
lines, just when I had succeeded in getting into favor, to go and spoil
it all in that unhappy way. Now that I had become acquainted with their
style of singing, the supposed fib, about which there had been such a